Abstractions

A week ago I submitted a draft abstract to my professor. After the last week of research I have a lot to add and expand on, but before I write an updated version, here is the original version:

Overview
The Directed Study will cover the topic of communication strategies of social movements. Specifically, it will examine the question, “What communication strategies are successful at encouraging and sustaining collective actions which ultimately bring about legal or social changes?”

Hypothesis
Social movements exist at two levels. They have a long-term goal that is their ultimate purpose, and they have short-term goals that serve as stepping stones towards achieving the longer term goal. Those short-term goals often take the form of specific collective actions – eg, a rally, letters to the editor, or calls to representatives to name a few. Collective actions undertaken by social movements share a number of features that present communications challenges, including:
• Having little direct benefit to an individual acting
• Having an indirect impact on achieving the overall goal
• Needing to be done by a large number of people to be effective
• Needing to be sustained over long periods of time

In other words, many individuals may feel a psychological distance from the campaign’s short-term goals, which can lead to a sense of futility about achieving the campaign’s long-term goal.

The depths of these challenges can be measured in terms of their psychological impact on individuals targeted by the campaign. In any campaign, there will always be a small number of individuals willing to pursue the cause no matter the cost or chance of success. But for a movement to be successful, the communicator must minimize the perception of these challenges to a larger segment of the population. It is only through minimizing the sense of distance and futility brought through the challenges above that a communicator can galvanize a populace that tends to accept the status quo, even when it doesn’t favor them personally.

To examine this theory, I will evaluate the success of communications strategies for three current U.S.-based social movements.

1. Ending the Genocide in Darfur
The Darfur movement is the largest anti-genocide movement in U.S. history. However, the campaign, which was energetic in its early years, has been weighed down as the genocide has dragged into its fifth year and activists have been met with increasingly negative news from Darfur. With U.S. foreign policy focused on Iraq and the war on terror, the Darfur movement has struggled to stay relevant. A complex foreign policy issue that cannot be solved just by U.S. intervention, the movement has had difficulty communicating specific steps that individuals or government officials can take to solve the situation.

The psychological – and physical - distance felt by targeted individuals is huge. Furthermore, the lack of even small success has deepened the sense of futility that many feel.

2. Ending the War in Iraq
Currently, the largest the foreign policy movement in the U.S., the anti-Iraq movement fought to win over American perceptions and to galvanize an unenergetic population. With an early strategy targeting the general population and focused on communicating the risks of the war, the movement has altered their strategy to focus more on political and military decision makers.

While many Americans do not know anyone directly affected by the war in Iraq, the communal sense of it being an “American” war, makes the psychological distance less than it is for Darfur, though it is still removed from day to day life. A growing sense of discontent, supported by a large base that has continued to push the issue, has made ending the war seem like a far-off, but highly achievable goal.

3. Youth Civic Engagement
This movement is often more closely identified with its short-term counter part – youth get out the vote efforts. While voting is an easily identifiable action step for the movement to encourage, the civic engagement movement has found itself stuck between young people who still don’t vote, and young people who have come to equate civic engagement with voting. Furthermore, these groups struggle to communicate the importance of the political process, and are confronted with a sense that one person cannot make a difference.

While the physical distance for voting is usually small, the psychological distance can be huge. Furthermore, even with the recent elections, there is still a pervasive sense that one vote cannot make a difference and the system simply does not work.